About Amy

I am a wife, mother, public speaker, and seminary student. I am passionate about helping people navigate the challenges of life through faith. This does not mean that I only speak to religious groups. In fact, about half of the speaking engagements I do are not for religious purposes. The message of acceptance, kindness, and perseverance is a universal one. My desire is to help people find purpose in their pain and help them to overcome physical and emotional challenges.

I was born with an anomalous birth defect on my spine which stunted the muscle on the right side of my back from growing and stopped my right arm from forming completely. My family lived in Mexico with little access to healthcare. By age two the physical deficits could not be ignored. My grandfather convinced my parents to move to the United States where I could receive proper medical care. Shortly after arriving in the States I was hospitalized at Shriner’s Hospital for Children. Consider that in the 1908s the hospital was actually named Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children. We’ve come a long way as a society.

My earliest memories are from Shriner’s Hospital doing endless therapies and experimenting with prosthetics. I can’t remember a time that physical pain wasn’t my constant companion. The physical pain would become debilitating over time but the emotional challenges were an all consuming demon I battled to overcome. In my desperation to hide my birth defect, I was ruled by fear and driven by anxiety until I experienced a miraculous deliverance in my early twenties. I slowly began to reshape my thinking and began to believe that I could find purpose in the many challenges I had experienced.

Finding confidence was arduous work but once my chains were removed, I could never go back to captivity. As I learned to accept how I had been made instead of despising it, I experienced a radical transformation. I used numerous tools to work through the mental and emotional toll of my disability and discovered I had been given a unique purpose. I had developed compassion, awareness, and determination not in spite of my disability but because of it. My pain became the catalyst for making an impact in the lives of others and my fuel for helping others to find freedom from their chains.

I have been married for fourteen years to a wonderful husband named Billy. Together we have three amazing boys and a dog who was born without his leg! We have built a beautiful life committed to ministry. We have fostered children, we have biological children, and we have an adopted son. We are both currently in seminary school and actively pursue mission work together.